As technology advances, data grows, and the colocation industry evolves, concerns and demands on data center providers and managers are changing, as well.
Download the full report.
A new white paper from Server Technology highlights the top 10 concerns of data center managers today, as well as some of the macro trends facing those responsible for designing, operating and sustaining the IT and physical support infrastructure found in today’s data centers.
The report targets some of the trends discussed in a recent article by Steve Gillaspy of Intel.
The four macro trends covered in the new Server Technology white paper include:
- Hyper Growth and Hyperscale: As edge and cloud computing grow in popularity, data levels are exploding, and colocation providers are having trouble keeping up as the need for new data center space continues to increase.
- Hyper Density: According to the report, the need to cut down on OPEX and CAPEX costs while also ramping up efficiency is spurring a move toward consolidation and virtualization.
- New Workloads: The IoT and extreme growth in big data workloads are putting unprecendented demands on data centers and networks.
- New Hardware: Data center managers also have to take into account new hardware, like specialized silicon that is being deployed in the data center with the intent of improving throughput and latency in support of the new workloads.
The report goes on to explore ten of the most common challenges for today’s data center providers and managers, as well as how to mitigate these challenges. Today’s hurdles include design concerns like “future proofing” to accommodate changing hardware and app requirements, as well as installation and configuration issues. Data center providers also have to take into account upgrade and retrofit concerns; CPU upgrades often require replacement of an enter chassis and more.
“Today’s data centers are increasingly called upon to run much larger, more complex workloads that are often very different from one another — so the hardware requirements to run them may vary widely from workload-to-workload, and may also change over the course of a day or even an hour.” — Server Technologies
The report contends that in tackling these challenges, data center providers and managers are turning more and more to the concept of “Software-Defined Everything” (SDE), which is one of the most talked-about trends in the evolution of data center design philosophy.
According to the report, “Rather than the individual elements of compute, storage, and networking, SDE treats infrastructure as a set of resources that are joined together through software and tailored to a specific workload.”
Server Technology points out that choosing suppliers that can bring together racks, PDUs, cable management, cooling, cabling and containment all with short lead times enable the data center designer and manager to make last second decisions in how to finish equipping the data center.
Download the full report, “Top 10 Concerns of Data Center Managers in 2018,” courtesy of Server Technology, to discover how to approach some of the biggest data center management challenges of today.